Flashman's unlikely and hilariously reluctant presence at these epochal events both reduce them to comic backdrops and simultaneously magnify them into impossibly momentous, history-changing, but above all real things. I know that, absent George MacDonald Frasier's idol-busting, feet-of-clay needling of the Great Man approach to history, I'd never have been moved to read Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, Kipling, or the more "serious" books I devoured about the destruction of the British Army at Gandamack, the Siege of Cawnpore during the Sepoy Mutiny, the Charge of the Light Brigade, Little Big Horn, Harpers Ferry. But it's a rock-bottom guarantee that my knowledge of Victorian history, culture, diction, mores, politics (sexual and otherwise) and military life, while not encyclopedic by any stretch, would have remained as sparse as they were in 1982 when I read my first Flashman - Flashman and the Redskins, as it happened - and became a lifelong devotee. What's more, forty years of feminist indoctrination have expunged the Flashmanic from my seduction technique.
Well, perhaps not everything Flash Harry hadn't much to say on the matter of modulation to the relative major in the bridge, and anything he might have bothered to teach me about user-interface design would probably have been a trifle vieux jeux.
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